These are the portraits of the women from the chapter beginnings in Scripture Princesses. The book itself is black and white with ink drawings, but I wanted these to be in color. I created these by first adjusting the line color of each portrait in photoshop and printing them onto cardstock with our inkjet printer that has waterproof ink. Cardstock isn’t the best paper to be painting on, but it’ll go through a desktop printer, so it’s a compromise.

I watercolored each portrait, focusing on being fast and loose, and using a mostly two color scheme for each.

This one of Mary Magdalene isn’t from the chapter head, but instead from the illustration where she sees the risen Christ and realizes who he is. My chapter-head portrait of her is sad, so I chose to paint her graphic from this happy scene.

Because cardstock isn’t meant for watercoloring, after I let each one dry, I put it under a pile of heavy books for the night to flatten down all the curling. It worked decently.

Here’s them all laid out in their pretty painted glory:

I wish I had thought of flattening under books as I was creating my 114 page graphic novel Together, which is also watercolored on cardstock. I used cardstock then because it was cheap and easy. 🙂 I was unemployed or under-employed through a lot of the creation of that comic in 2008-2010.